Month: January 2017

Juan E. Méndez stepped down from his position as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on October 31, 2016, ending six years of investigating and reporting on the use of torture in the 193 UN member states. He traveled the world on fact-finding visits, made urgent […]

• Timothy Muise was released from solitary confinement at MCI Norfolk in Massachusetts after being sent there for two weeks for speaking by phone to a local radio station, on the topic of lack of accountability in the Department of Corrections. His placement in the hole “pending investigation” of what was classified as a lowest level disciplinary […]

• Just before leaving office, President Obama commuted the sentences of two survivors of solitary confinement. Puerto Rican Nationalist Oscar López Rivera spent 12 of his 35 years in prison in isolation. Whisteblower Chelsea Manning spent about a year in the box after her arrest, and was also placed in solitary after trying to commit […]

• At the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Facility in Shirley, MA, “dozens” of people allegedly refused to be locked in their cells after fights broke out on a unit. “According to the Department of Corrections, sprinkler heads were broken off, camera systems and the computer system were destroyed, and inmates used fire extinguishers and other makeshift weapons […]

The American Civil Liberties Union today released an extensive report on people with physical disabilities in solitary confinement. Caged In: Solitary Confinement’s Devastating Harm on Prisoners with Physical Disabilities provides both statistical and anecdotal evidence that people with physical disabilities, who are dramatically overrepresented in prisons, are subject to abysmal and flagrantly illegal treatment while […]

• A 32-year-old man held in solitary confinement at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correction Center has been on hunger strike for about two months. “When in in the SHU, a person is always cuffed outside the cell. They make us stand with our back to the door and place our hands through a slot before and after […]

Perhaps no story captures the injustice and horror of juvenile solitary confinement more than that of Kalief Browder, the Bronx sixteen-year-old who was wrongfully accused of stealing a backpack in 2010 and spent three years on Rikers Island awaiting trial. Two of his three years on Rikers were spent in solitary confinement, where Kalief was […]

• The Charlotte Observer published a series of articles about the placement of youth in solitary in North Carolina’s jails, including one article that focused on the isolation of 16 and 17 year olds in Mecklenburg County, another article that outlined Mecklenburg County commissioner opposition to the practice, and a third article that examined the […]